8800GTS 512 MB overclocking

[Melhisedek]

Hello there folks, have had this card for a while now, and decided to try and overclock it, for fun mostly. Searching a sweet spot for 24/7 use.

Card is not moded in any way just stock cooler and nice case cooling (Antex 1200)

I have latest Rivatuner and 178.xx drivers (not 180 ones) and using ATi Tool for stability. I've set the card fan to 53% as 1-2% above that and I start to hear it "on top" of the other fans

My first question is:
What would give me biggest increase in performance? Core, Shaders or Memory?
I remember back in the days when I had old GF4 Ti 4200 overclocking memory gave biggest increase in performance so that is why I ask :) I understand that performance is probably balanced between all three but still which one I should try and max out?

I found out that each of the 3 can be overclocked pretty high on its own but if I add the two other parts into equation neither can go nearly as high.
Memory is the weakest link on my card, can't even get it stable to 1000 MHz. So I hope overclocking the other two gives biggest increase in performance :)

Core and Shaders will do 760 and 17xx respectively perhaps a bit higher if I lower the mem clocks.

So any and all tips are welcome :)

Thank you for your time!

[Badbonji]

On my 8800gts overclocking the core increased the performance. I gained 400 points overall in vantage P by increasing the core and shader alone, whereas memory only gave me an extra 25-50 points.

[Xaeryan]

Why not overclock them all? :-)
But if you're looking for which one to 'focus' on, it really is a matter of what games you play. Some are more sensitive to shader adjustments (Crysis comes to mind), some memory, and some core. This variance is due to different algorithms that each game uses to render the graphics. Get some time-demo benchmarks for the games you play, run some baselines, then do some tweaking to see which makes the most difference. You may end up finding that overclocking all three, although not as extreme as if you were to overclock just one, yields better or same performance as just overclocking one to the extreme.